Yvonne van Dongen
Veteran NZ journo incredulous gender ideology escaped the lab. Won’t rest until reality makes a comeback.
My previous story on the Accredited Employer Work Visa (AEWV) was informed by discussions I had with Indian citizens concerned about the current crop of migrants hailing from their home country.
This response to that story below comes from another Indian migrant of my acquaintance. Bakul Gupta is a licensed immigration advisor at Trusthaven Immigration Services Limited in Auckland – and a mean pickleball player. He has been in New Zealand for 10 years and has recently published a book The Kiwi Dream: Housing, Opportunity and the Future of New Zealand.
He wrote a fulsome reply which I reproduce below. I appreciate the effort he put into this since I believe it’s a conversation we need to have. If the audience response to the Platform on this topic is any indication, it’s also a conversation many of us really want. I will respond to his missive later but first read
Bakul Gupta and let me know your thoughts.
FROM BAKUL GUPTA
I read your AEWV article with a lot of interest. You have obviously put a great deal of research into it, and I agree with you on one very important point: there have been serious problems with migrant exploitation under the AEWV scheme, particularly in the earlier years of the policy.
As someone who works with the immigration system every day, though, I think there are a number of places where the article moves from legitimate criticism of the AEWV into conclusions that the underlying facts don’t necessarily support. I thought I would give you my perspective.
The first issue is the portrayal of the AEWV as essentially a “high-trust” system in which an employer pays a relatively modest accreditation fee, makes declarations and is then effectively able to import migrant workers.
That may fairly describe some of the weaknesses in the original implementation, but it isn’t a good description of how the current system actually operates.
There are three separate stages: employer accreditation, the Job Check and the migrant’s individual AEWV application. At the Job Check stage, the employer normally has to provide a job description, pay details and evidence of advertising. Most ANZSCO skill-level 1–3 jobs have to be advertised for at least 14 days and level 4–5 jobs for at least 21 days. For level 4–5 jobs, the employer also has to engage with Work and Income. They have to provide information about the New Zealanders who applied and, for level 4–5 positions, explain why New Zealand applicants were not suitable or available. A Job Check can be declined where suitable and available New Zealanders exist.
So while declarations remain part of the process and there is certainly scope for abuse, it isn’t simply a matter of an accredited employer being trusted to bring in whoever they want.
Secondly, I think the article needs to distinguish much more clearly between what went wrong with the original AEWV and the AEWV system that exists now.
The independent Bestwick review was highly critical of aspects of INZ’s administration of the scheme, and rightly so. MBIE accepted all of its findings and recommendations. But that is actually an important part of the story: the problems were identified and substantial changes followed.
For example, additional requirements were introduced for lower-skilled occupations, including labour-market engagement with Work and Income, longer advertising requirements, minimum skills/experience requirements and English-language requirements. INZ has also significantly increased post-accreditation compliance activity.
As at 31 August 2026, INZ says it had undertaken 9,551 post-accreditation checks involving 6,566 employers. There had been 1,641 accreditation revocations and 1,049 suspensions, with further investigations and assessments underway.
Those figures certainly demonstrate that there has been a serious compliance problem, and in that respect they support your concerns. But they also demonstrate that the current system isn’t simply operating on blind trust.
Another point I think requires context is the figure of more than 209,000 AEWVs. That is the cumulative number of AEWV applications approved since the scheme opened in July 2022. It does not mean that there are 209,000 AEWV workers currently in New Zealand. INZ’s figure as at 31 August 2026 is a little over 94,000 current AEWV holders.
That distinction becomes particularly important when the discussion moves from temporary migration to permanent migration. I think one of the biggest problems with the article is the impression it can leave that AEWV is effectively a backdoor route to permanent residence. An AEWV does not itself give someone residence.
Yes, an AEWV holder may eventually become a resident, but only if they separately qualify under a residence category. That might be the Skilled Migrant Category, Green List, a Work to Residence pathway, a family category or another category for which they independently meet the requirements.
Simply spending three or five years in New Zealand on an AEWV doesn’t entitle someone to residence.
In fact, there is a maximum continuous stay under the AEWV rules. When a person reaches that maximum and has no other visa entitlement, they generally have to spend the required period outside New Zealand before obtaining another AEWV.
Similarly, saying that an AEWV holder can move to a student visa, partnership visa or another temporary visa needs qualification. They cannot simply “switch” visas as a means of remaining here indefinitely. They have to satisfy all the eligibility requirements of the new visa category. A person without a genuine basis for a partnership visa, for example, cannot obtain one simply because their AEWV is expiring.
I therefore think there is an important difference between saying “Some temporary migrant workers ultimately become permanent residents” and saying or implying “The AEWV system is a gateway through which temporary low-skilled workers can progressively remain in New Zealand permanently.” The first is obviously true. The second requires much more evidence.
Where I have the greatest concern with the article, though, is the way the discussion of AEWV eventually becomes intertwined with Indian ethnicity.
You refer to Indians operating dairies, liquor stores and vape shops, Australian scrutiny of Indian student applications, fake Indian qualifications, truck-driver licensing issues, methamphetamine offending, tax issues in the kiwifruit industry and even Singh becoming a very common surname among New Zealand babies.
Some of those individual facts or cases may well be accurate. But I don’t think putting them alongside one another establishes the proposition being advanced.
If an Indian-origin person commits immigration fraud, drug offences, tax fraud or driver-licensing fraud, that is evidence concerning that person or that particular scheme. It isn’t evidence that Indian AEWV migrants generally represent an immigration-integrity problem.
The methamphetamine example particularly troubles me in this context. Unless there is a demonstrated connection between that offending and the AEWV system, the ethnicity or surname of the offender doesn’t tell us anything meaningful about whether the AEWV policy is working.
Likewise, the popularity of “Singh” as a surname among newborn babies may tell us something interesting about New Zealand’s changing demographics, but it doesn’t demonstrate abuse of the AEWV scheme.
I think this is where correlation and causation start getting mixed together.
There is also a danger in describing India as a “low trust society” and then using that characterisation to explain exploitation of New Zealand’s immigration system.
There undoubtedly are fraud and document-integrity issues in parts of the Indian migration market. As an immigration adviser I would never pretend otherwise. Job selling, fabricated employment documents, false experience, unlicensed immigration advice and exploitation by intermediaries are real issues.
But that is very different from extrapolating those problems to Indian migrants generally.
There are enormous differences between regions, industries, educational backgrounds and socioeconomic groups within a country of more than 1.4 billion people. I don’t think a broad “low trust society” explanation provides sufficient evidence for what is actually a complicated immigration-policy and regulatory problem.
There is another side of AEWV which I think gets somewhat lost in the article. A very large number of AEWV workers are filling genuine vacancies for legitimate New Zealand businesses. They are nurses, tradespeople, technicians, chefs, construction workers, agricultural workers, hospitality workers and people in many other occupations.
The fact that exploitation occurs within an immigration programme doesn’t establish that the programme itself is principally a mechanism for exploitation.
I would compare it to the student visa system. Student visa fraud exists. Some education providers have behaved badly and some international students have been exploited. But that doesn’t mean international education itself is fraudulent.
The appropriate questions are: how prevalent is the abuse, where is it concentrated, why are the safeguards failing and what changes would reduce it without preventing legitimate employers from accessing workers they genuinely cannot find in New Zealand?
I actually think your question about dairies, vape shops and liquor stores is worth asking. If a relatively small retail business repeatedly claims that it cannot find New Zealanders to perform relatively low-skilled work, there is a legitimate policy question about how rigorously the labour-market test should be applied.
I would support much stronger scrutiny in circumstances like that. But that is an argument for better risk profiling, stronger verification and enforcement. It isn’t necessarily evidence that AEWV as a whole amounts to an indentured-labour migration system.
There is also an interesting contradiction in the exploitation argument. The people being exploited are themselves often the migrants.
If somebody in India pays an intermediary $30,000 for a New Zealand job, arrives here and discovers there is no genuine work, or is forced to return part of their wages to an employer, the migrant may have breached immigration requirements in some circumstances, but they may simultaneously be the victim of an organised exploitation scheme. That distinction matters enormously.
I’ve dealt with migrants professionally for many years, and the picture is much more complicated than “migrants exploiting a high-trust New Zealand system”. Sometimes that certainly occurs. But in many cases it is employers, overseas agents, intermediaries or networks exploiting migrants’ desperation to come to New Zealand.
There is also an important protection within the immigration system that I think should be acknowledged when describing AEWV workers as effectively being in “indentured labour”: the Migrant Exploitation Protection Work Visa (MEPV).
The MEPV was specifically created for migrant workers who experience employment exploitation. Where an eligible migrant worker reports exploitation and obtains the required Report of Exploitation Assessment Letter from Employment New Zealand, they may be able to obtain an MEPV and leave the employer connected to their existing work visa.
That doesn’t mean the underlying vulnerability disappears. A migrant who has borrowed a large amount of money overseas to obtain a job, has limited English, or fears losing their immigration status may still feel enormous pressure not to report an employer. Those are very real problems.
But it is important when using a term as strong as “indentured labour” to explain that New Zealand does have a specific immigration mechanism designed to allow exploited migrant workers to get out of that employment relationship. The worker is not legally required to continue working for an exploitative employer simply because their original work visa was linked to that employer.
That is why I think “indentured labour” is a powerful phrase but potentially points the reader towards the wrong conclusion. If the argument is that tying a worker’s immigration status to an employer creates a power imbalance that makes exploitation easier, I think there is a serious policy argument there.
But if the implication is that AEWV is essentially a mechanism through which Indians purchase jobs, enter New Zealand and eventually acquire permanent residence, I don’t think the evidence establishes that.
So I think there are actually two different stories here.
One is a very strong story about the weaknesses in the original AEWV design, inadequate verification, job selling, employer misconduct, migrant vulnerability and whether New Zealand has sufficiently robust compliance mechanisms. I think there is plenty of evidence for that story.
The other is a much broader story about Indian migration, crime, social trust, demographic change and AEWV becoming a pathway to permanent settlement.
I don’t think the evidence in the article establishes that second proposition nearly as convincingly, and combining the two actually weakens what I think is a legitimate and important criticism of the AEWV system.
I hope you don’t mind me giving you such a long response! I found the article genuinely interesting, which is why I went through it carefully. I agree with quite a lot of your criticism of how AEWV was designed and initially administered. My disagreement is mainly with some of the conclusions drawn from those failures and, particularly, with treating separate examples involving Indians as evidence of a wider AEWV or migration problem.
I thought it might be useful to give you the perspective of somebody dealing with these rules and migrants in practice every day.
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack.
